“I—um—yes.” Pierre managed to fix his eyes to her face, through obviously conscious effort. “My father… um, he said this time he means it, and…

Lore let her face fall by careful degrees, first into confusion, then shock, then sorrow. “Oh,” she murmured, wrapping her arms around herself and turning her face away to show a length of pale white neck. “This month, of all months.”

She didn’t elaborate. She didn’t need to. If there was anything Lore had learned in twenty-three years alive, ten spent on the streets of Dellaire, it was that men generally preferred you to be a set piece in the story they made up, rather than trying to tell it yourself.

In that regard, Pierre didn’t disappoint. From the corner of her eye, she saw his pale brows draw together, a deepening blush lighting the skin beneath his freckles. They were all moon-pale, Nicolas’s boys. It made their blushes look like something viral.

His eyes went past her, to the depths of the dilapidated row house beyond. It was morning, though only just, and the shadows hid everything but the dust motes twisting in sun shards. Not that there was much to see back there, anyway. Michal was still asleep upstairs, and Elle was sprawled on the couch, a wine bottle in her hand and a slightly musical snore on her lips.

“Is there an illness?” Pierre kept his voice hushed, low. His face tried for sympathetic, but it looked more like he’d put bad milk in his coffee. “A child?”

Lore’s brows shot up. In all the stories she’d let men spin about her, that was a first. But beggars couldn’t be choosers. She gently laid a hand on her abdomen and let that be answer enough. It wasn’t technically a lie if she let him draw his own conclusions.

She was past caring about lying, anyway. In the eyes of the Bleeding God, Lore was damned whether or not she kept her spiritual record spotless. Might as well lean into it.

“Oh, you poor girl.” Pierre was probably younger than she was, and here he went clucking like a mother hen. Lore managed to keep her eyes from rolling, but only just. “Do you know who the father is?” He raised his hand, settled it on her bare shoulder.

And every nerve in Lore’s body seized.

It was abrupt and unexpected enough for her to shudder, to shake off his hand in a motion that didn’t fit the soft, vulnerable narrative she’d been building ever since she opened this damn door. She’d grown used to feeling this reaction to dead things—stone, metal, cloth. Corpses, when she couldn’t avoid them. It was natural to sense Mortem in something dead, no matter how unpleasant, and at this point, she could hide her reaction, keep it contained.